Number 1617: Me love hate Bizarro!

“Tales of the Bizarro World” — featuring stories of the defective Superman clones and characters of the Superman universe — was a big favorite of mine when it appeared in Adventure Comics in 1961-62. The idea of an inverted world has passed from Superman comic books into pop culture, even showing up on an episode of Seinfeld.

This story, which originally appeared in Adventure #291, was reprinted with several others in Superman #202 (1968), an 80-Page Giant issue, which used as its theme the topsy-turvy Bizarro World stories. (It is also the only silver age comic book I bought in 2013, when I searched my collection and could not find it. Me hate it when that happens!) The Bizarro stories were also collected in a trade paperback a few years ago.

“The Bizarro Perfect Crimes” was written by Jerry Siegel and drawn by John Forte. At the time the series ended its 15 issue run I was extremely disappointed and stopped buying Adventure Comics, which means I missed out on the popular “Legion of Super Heroes” feature that took Bizarro’s spot. It went on to be a very collectible series. In that way it was a Bizarro thing for me to do.

This is the second of our three-part Spacey Stories theme week.

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The Trouble With Robots

One of the central themes running through DC comics in the Silver Age was a reverence for science combined with skepticism for applied science (i.e., technology).  Few plot points illustrate this better than the continual problems that Superman (and Superboy) had with his robots.

They were originally created to help Superman out of jams, particularly in situations where both Superman and Clark Kent had to be somewhere at the same time.  However, they were unreliable at best, often shorting out due to electrical disturbances, or sunspots.  And at times they were unavailable for other reasons:

And on more than one occasion, they nearly revealed his secret identity:

At least twice, his robots went rogue.  Ajax, a robot who was transformed into an android by members of the Superman Revenge Squad in Superman #163, apparently went off the reservation and tried to kill Superman, although it turned out that he was just pretending to do so to fool the SRS squad.  And when Superman tried to create an android of his own in Superman #174, it turned out to be mistake-prone and attempted to take Superman's place by convincing Clark Kent that he had never really been super.

But nothing reveals Superman's trouble with robots more than the story in Action #299, surely one of the wackiest in the entire Silver Age.  He receives a robot named LL-35 from the planet Jax that is supposed to be much smarter than even Superman himself.  LL-35 makes a suggestion:

Here are the robots he builds according to the instructions:

Kryptonite vision, you say?  I can't imagine how that could possibly backfire on Superman.  Unless, that is, some aliens tampered with the robots' loyalty tapes:

Well, that's pretty unlucky.  And for the next several pages, the robots torment our hero, using Red Kryptonite to turn him into an elastic man, and later giving him three faces:

Superman doesn't even get out of this using his wits; instead he gets lucky.  See, this was all taking place on an alien planet, where every day, a fallout dust disintegrates metal:

Any other examples of Superman's robots causing headaches for him?

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When Did Superman's Heat Vision Start?

As many of you probably know, Superman's heat vision was not an early power. Both Superman and Superboy originally used "the heat" of their X-ray vision to melt things. This changed at some point fairly early in Weisinger's tenure. I am not quite sure why; was it because of the obvious problem that bullets were made of lead and thus not affected by X-rays? So I started going through the early Weisinger Action issues, looking for the changeover. What surprised me at first was how common the "heat of my X-ray vision" meme was in Superman. To give you an idea, it popped up in Action #254,, #255, #256, #258, #259, #262, #263 and #264, or in 8 of 11 issues. But after that it vanished for awhile, only appearing in Action #271. And even that appearance comes with an asterisk:

But in actuality that particular panel is being narrated by a fake Superman and Luthor henchman named Gypo. So it is far from certain that really represents a real instance of the heat of Superman's X-ray vision being used. On the other hand, it is fairly easy to pinpoint the first use of Superman's heat vision in Action; it appears in Action #275 (April 1961):

Okay, so in the second appearance of Brainiac, heat vision was established? But you know the problem; there are several other Superman mags to check, so I decided to start walking it back from April 1961, partially to see if there was an earlier appearance and partially to see if there was a more credible last mention of the "heat of my X-ray vision". There was no mention of Superman's heat from eyes power in Superman #144 (April 1961), but I did find this in Superman #143 (February 1961):

End of story, right? Not quite, however, for when I went forward to see when the first mention of Superman's "heat vision" came, I found mention of the heat of his X-ray vision in stories published after April 1961. The latest mention I can find now is from Superman #146 (July 1961):

The first mention of heat vision I can find in Superman issues comes from #148 (October 1961):

The transition from "heat of X-ray vision" to "heat vision" is pretty easy to track in Superboy. From Superboy #87 (March 1961):

While in the following issue (April 1961):

So it appears pretty obvious that the changeover came between the issues published in March 1961 and April 1961. Update: This is also one of those areas where you cannot trust the reprints. When I went to read the Superman story in Action #259, the closest issue at hand was the reprint in 80-Page Giant #1 (August 1964), where this sequence occurs:

But after noticing that there were several mentions of "heat of my X-ray vision" after this, I hunted down the original, and sure enough:

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Number 1172: Superman in Oz

I like to look at editions of American comics published in other countries. This issue of Superman, published in Australia for K.G. Murray (and distributed by an English company...so did it appear in the UK, also?) is a good example. They've left the Superman contents unchanged from the American, but made small changes in the dialogue of the Henry Boltinoff gag pages.

Last Sunday I called Superman "stodgy" compared to Captain Marvel. I mean that while both Captain Marvel and Superman stories could be very silly, in the Captain Marvel universe the silliness is played for laughs, but in the Superman stories of the same era the humor is sometimes unintentional.

"The Adventures of Mental-Man" has a ridiculous premise and depends on extraordinary circumstances to make the plot work. You'll see what I mean when you read it. Wayne Boring did the artwork, and he was "my" Superman artist growing up. If nothing else, I knew it was a Wayne Boring job just by the panels showing Superman in flight. Al Plastino* did "The Dog Who Loved Superman" in much the same Boring style (and yes, I'm being intentional). It's inked by Stan Kaye, who inked a lot of Superman stories to give them some consistency. Jerry Coleman wrote the first, Bill Finger the second.

"The Adventures of Mental-Man" was originally published in the US in Action Comics #196 (1954), and "The Dog Who Loved Superman" was originally from Superman #88 (1954):

*The Stan Kaye inking credit is from Grand Comics Database. In a 2007 interview Plastino claimed he did all his own inking, and that he was told to draw like Boring, whose style he described as "rigid."

Plastino's style is evident, and confirmed by his signature, in these two "U.S." Royal advertising strips from 1951 issues of Boys' Life magazine. Advertising is where the money was, and artists good enough to get these jobs did very well.

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